Hook-up culture dehumanizes sexual relations

Published January 29. 2018 12:01AM

Darrius D. Hills

Like many, I was appalled by President Donald Trump’s hot mic comments regarding the access to women’s bodies that his celebrity status enabled. I remain moved by the scores of women and men who’ve taken to #MeToo and its social media presence to both reject sexual violence and empower themselves by recovering their voices and telling their stories.

I am particularly now captivated by comedian Aziz Ansari’s reported failure to understand verbal and non-verbal cues pertaining to a woman’s disinterest in sexual congress during a date. The Ansari story is particularly disturbing because it raises some uncomfortable questions about the nature and terms of sexual ethics in casual “hook-up” culture and about the consequences of blurred lines in sexual consent.

Philosophically, I wonder what it is at the primordial level that opens the door to the predatory sexual behaviors, jokes and pervasive sexualization that saturates our culture and interactions, in both the public or private spheres.

Martin Buber’s classic 1923 book, “I and Thou,” outlines an ontology of human relationships that is instructive for sexual ethics given the pornographic/pornotropic landscape of 21st century hook-up culture. There are two modes of relating, according to Buber: the I-it and the I-thou.

Relationships grounded in an I-it paradigm feature a subject/object framing. These relationships, ultimately, aren’t relationships at all, in an authentic, real sense. Rendering others as “its” short circuits and dismantles the fullness of their human identities — they become things — less than whole selves.

The “I-it” is operative in hook-up culture. If we render a person less than human — less than whole — as an object at our disposal and suited solely for our momentary gratification and use, it becomes all the more acceptable to treat them as disposable playthings subject to our own whims and desires. This is the same death-dealing mechanism of relating (and not relating) that has been responsible for genocidal warfare, slavery and sex trafficking.

What we should aim for, rather, are I-thou relationships — subject/subject relationships in which we see persons as persons — not as objects. I-thou relationships are grounded in mutualized reception and (re)cognition of humanity and personhood.

This reciprocal, shared sense of human connection far eclipses the truncated vision of others that we may impose out of our own desires and pursuit of gratification. Good sex, and good sexual ethics, are reciprocal and relational — prioritizing personality over physicality. I-thou relationships preserve both our humanity and the humanity of those we encounter, interpersonally or otherwise. Such a view flies in direct opposition to hook-up culture, in which bodies are framed as a means to sexual ends.

The essence of a person cannot be reduced to their capacity to provide sexual pleasure. This manner of gross objectification denies authentic relationships and violates the erotic energy housed within all of us.

If, as feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde reminds us, the source of the erotic within each of us is positive, and can be used for creative and wholesome purposes, then perhaps our conception of the relational element of sexuality should be fused with a sensitivity to the need for erotic creativity. Embracing both the fullness of human self and the humanity of others can be a liberating process of creation rather than destruction.

Darrius D. Hills is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University in Maryland. He wrote this for the Baltimore Sun.